This document contains extensive summaries of ALL ARTICLES for the 2020/2021 edition of the Strategic Management course offered at Universiteit van Amsterdam (course code: 6012B0430Y), which is part of the minors “Business Administration: Managing Strategy and Marketing”, “Business Administra...
This document contains extensive summaries of ALL ARTICLES for the 2020/2021 edition of
the Strategic Management course offered at Universiteit van Amsterdam (course code:
6012B0430Y), which is part of the minors “Business Administration: Managing Strategy and
Marketing”, “Business Administration: Designing Effective Organizations”, and the exchange
programme of the Faculty of Economics and Business. Each article has been summarized in
depth and provides a solid overview of the content discussed in the articles.
What Is Strategy? 2
I. Operational Effectiveness Is Not Strategy
II. Strategy Rests on Unique Activities
III. A Sustainable Strategic Position Requires Trade-offs
IV. Fit Drives Both Competitive Advantage and Sustainability
V. Rediscovering Strategy
Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage 5
Defining Key Concepts
Competition with Homogeneous and Perfectly Mobile Resources
Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage
Applying the Framework
Strategy and the “Business Portfolio” 8
The Business Portfolio Concept
Portfolio Strategy
Portfolio Approaches in Practice
Implications for Strategy Development Today
Separation of Ownership and Control 11
I. Introduction
II. Residual Claims and Decision Processes
III. Fundamental Relations between Risk-bearing and Decision Processes
IV. The Spectrum of Organizations
What Is Disruptive Innovation? 14
Is Uber a Disruptive Innovation?
Why Getting It Right matters
What a Disruptive Innovation Lens Can Reveal
How Our Thinking About Disruption Has Developed
Strategic Management summary by David Schouten (david@schouten.io)
1
, What Is Strategy?
Porter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy?. Harvard business review, 74( 6), 61-78.
I. Operational Effectiveness Is Not Strategy
Companies must be flexible to respond rapidly to competitive and market changes.
Positioning is rejected as too static for today’s dynamic markets and changing technologies.
Many companies’ problems originate from the failure to distinguish between operational
effectiveness and strategy. Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to
superior performance, which is the primary goal of any enterprise.
A company can outperform rivals only if
it can establish a difference that it can preserve.
Operational effectiveness (OE) means:
performing similar activities better than rivals
perform them. This includes, but is not limited
to, efficiency. Strategic positioning, on the
other hand, means performing different
activities from rivals’ or performing similar
activities in different ways.
The productivity frontier (the sum of all
existing best practices at any given time) is
constantly shifting outward as new technologies
and management approaches are developed.
OE competition shifts the productivity frontier
outward, effectively raising the bar for everyone.
Although such competition produces absolute
improvement in operational effectiveness, it
leads to relative improvement for no one.
II. Strategy Rests on Unique Activities
Competitive strategy means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a
unique mix of value. The essence of strategy is in the activities: choosing to perform
activities differently or to perform different activities thn rivals. Otherwise, a strategy is
nothing more than a marketing slogan that will not withstand competition.
Strategic positions emerge from three distinct sources, which are not mutually
exclusive and often overlap:
1. Variety-based positioning → based on the choice of products or service varieties
rather than customer segments. Arises when a company can best produce particular
products or services using distinctive sets of activities
2. Needs-based positioning → closer to traditional thinking about targeting a segment
of customers. It arises when there are groups of customers with differing needs, and
when a tailored set of activities can serve those needs best
3. Access-based positioning → although needs may be similar among customer
segments, the best configuration of activities to reach them can be different. Access
can relate to customer geography or customer scale, or of anything that requires a
different set of activities to reach customers in the best way
In practice, variety and access-based differences often accompany needs differences.
2
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